A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

Copyright © 2003 by Richard Dawkins

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Dawkins, Richard, 1941–

A devil’s chaplain : reflections on hope, lies, science,

and love / Richard Dawkins.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Science—Philosophy. 3. Religion and science. I. Title.

QH366.2.D373 2003

500—dc21 2003050859

ISBN 978-0-618-33540-4 hardcover

ISBN 978-0-618-48539-0 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-41652-6

v3.1117

The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: What Is True?: published as Hall of Mirrors in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, © 2003 Forbes Inc. • Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls: published in the Sunday Telegraph. Copyright © Richard Dawkins / Telegraph Group Ltd. 1998. • Postmodernism Disrobed: reprinted by permission from Nature 394, pp. 141–3 (1998). Copyright © 1998 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. • Darwin Triumphant: from Man and Beast Revisited, edited by Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Copyright © 1991 by Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the publisher. • The Information Challenge: originally published in December 1998 in the official journal of Australian skeptics, The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4. Reprinted by permission. • Son of Moore’s Law: from The Next Fifty Years, edited by J. Brockman, Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books. • Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers: published as the foreword to The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. • Viruses of the Mind: published in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, edited by B. Dahlbom, Blackwell, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing. • The Great Convergence: published as Snake Oil and Holy Water in Forbes ASAP, October 4, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, © 2003 Forbes Inc. • Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature: reprinted by permission from Nature 276, pp. 121–3 (1978). Copyright © 1978 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. • Human Chauvinism: reprinted by permission from Evolution 51, no. 3, pp. 1015–20 (1997). • The Lion Children: published as the foreword to The Lion Children, by Angus, Maisie, and Travers McNeice, Orion Publishing Group, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

For Juliet on her Eighteenth Birthday

Introduction to the American Edition

This book is a personal selection from among all the articles and lectures, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years. There are many themes here, some arising out of Darwinism or science in general, some concerned with morality, some with religion, education, justice, mourning, Africa, history of science, some just plain personal – or what the late Carl Sagan might have called love letters to science and rationality.

Though I admit to occasional flames of (entirely justified) irritation in my writing, I like to think that the greater part of it is good-humoured, perhaps even humorous. Where there is passion, well, there is much to be passionate about. Where there is anger, I hope it is a controlled anger. Where there is sadness, I hope it never spills over into despair but still looks to the future. But mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy, and I hope it shows in these pages.

The book is divided into seven sections, chosen and arranged by the compiler Latha Menon in close collaboration with me. With all the polymathic, literate intelligence you would expect of the executive editor of Encarta Encyclopedia’s World English Edition, Latha has proved to be an inspired anthologist. I have written preambles to each of the seven sections, in which I have reflected on the pieces Latha thought worthy of reprinting and the connections among them. Hers was the difficult task, and I am filled with admiration for her simultaneous grasp of vastly more of my writings than are here reproduced, and for the skill with which she achieved a subtler balance of them than I thought they possessed. But as for what she had to choose from, the responsibility is, of course, mine.

It is not possible to list all the people who helped with the individual pieces, spread as they are over 25 years. Help with the book itself came from Yan Wong, Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt, Michael Dover, Laura van Dam, Catherine Bradley, Anthony Cheetham and, of course, Latha Menon herself. My gratitude to Charles Simonyi – so much more than a benefactor – is unabated. And my wife, Lalla Ward, continues to lend her encouragement, her advice and her fine-tuned ear for the music of language.

Richard Dawkins

1

Science and Sensibility

The first essay in this volume, A Devil’s Chaplain (1.1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1.2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It’s hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much – or as little – open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards.

At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in childhood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist’s Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today’s consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like ‘I suppose you’ll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then?’ are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is ‘Where will it all end? Rights for oysters?’ (Bertrand Russell’s quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1.3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There’s no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.

In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband MP, then Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit and now Minister for School Standards, to write a memo on a particular subject for Tony Blair to read over the Christmas holiday. My brief was Science, Genetics, Risk and Ethics (1.4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here (eliminating Risk and some other passages to avoid overlap with other essays).

Any proposal to curtail, in the smallest degree, the right of trial by jury is greeted with wails of affront. On the three occasions when I have been called to serve on a jury, the experience proved disagreeable and disillusioning. Much later, two grotesquely over-publicized trials in the United States prompted me to think through a central reason for my distrust of the jury system, and to write it down as Trial By Jury (1.5).

Crystals are first out of the box of tricks toted by psychics, mystics, mediums and other charlatans. My purpose in the next article was to explain the real magic of crystals to the readers of a London newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph. At one time it was only the low-grade tabloid newspapers that encouraged popular superstitions like crystal-gazing or astrology. Nowadays some up-market newspapers, including the Telegraph, have dumbed down to the extent of printing a regular astrology column, which is why I accepted their invitation to write Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls (1.6).

A more intellectual species of charlatan is the target of the next essay, Postmodernism Disrobed (1.7). Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to – and do – work hard to make their language as simple as possible (‘but no simpler,’ rightly insisted Einstein). Other academics – some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science – suffer from what Peter Medawar (I think) called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance. The physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a blissfully funny hoax on the Editorial ‘Collective’ (what else?) of a particularly pretentious journal of social studies. Afterwards, together with his colleague Jean Bricmont, he published a book, Intellectual Impostures, ably documenting this epidemic of Fashionable Nonsense (as their book was retitled in the United States). ‘Postmodernism Disrobed’ is my review of this hilarious but disquieting book.

I must add, the fact that the word ‘postmodernism’ occurs in the title given me by the Editors of Nature does not imply that I (or they) know what it means. Indeed, it is my belief that it means nothing at all, except in the restricted context of architecture where it originated. I recommend the following practice, whenever anybody uses the word in some other context. Stop them instantly and ask, in a neutral spirit of friendly curiosity, what it means. Never once have I heard anything that even remotely approaches a usable, or even faintly coherent, definition. The best you’ll get is a nervous titter and something like, ‘Yes I agree, it is a terrible word isn’t it, but you know what I mean.’ Well no, actually, I don’t.

As a lifelong teacher, I fret about where we go wrong in education. I hear horror stories almost daily of ambitious parents or ambitious schools ruining the joy of childhood. And it starts wretchedly early. A six-year-old boy receives ‘counselling’ because he is ‘worried’ that his performance in mathematics is falling behind. A headmistress summons the parents of a little girl to suggest that she should be sent for external tuition. The parents expostulate that it is the school’s job to teach the child. Why is she falling behind? She is falling behind, explains the headmistress patiently, because the parents of all the other children in the class are paying for them to go to external tutors.

It is not just the joy of childhood that is threatened. It is the joy of true education: of reading for the sake of a wonderful book rather than for an exam; of following up a subject because it is fascinating rather than because it is on a syllabus; of watching a great teacher’s eyes light up for sheer love of the subject. The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle (1.8) is an attempt to bring back from the past the spirit of just such a great teacher.

1.1

A Devil’s Chaplain

Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil’s Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.

A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste there is no doubt. As I have put it before, the racing elegance of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Clumsy and blundering though the process undoubtedly is, its results are opposite. There is nothing clumsy about a swallow; nothing blundering about a shark. What is clumsy and blundering, by the standards of human drawing boards, is the Darwinian algorithm that led to their evolution. As for cruelty, here is Darwin again, in a letter to Asa Gray of 1860:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

Darwin’s French contemporary Jean Henri Fabre described similar behaviour in a digger wasp, Ammophila:

It is the general rule that larvae possess a centre of innervation for each segment. This is so in particular with the Grey Worm, the sacrificial victim of the Hairy Ammophila. The Wasp is acquainted with this anatomical secret: she stabs the caterpillar again and again, from end to end, segment by segment, ganglion by ganglion.¹

Darwin’s Ichneumonidae, like Fabre’s digger wasps, sting their prey not to kill but to paralyse, so their larvae can feed on fresh (live) meat. As Darwin clearly understood, blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection, although on other occasions he tried to play down the cruelty, suggesting that killing bites are mercifully swift. But the Devil’s Chaplain would be equally swift to point out that if there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. Such kindness as may appear emerges from the same imperative as the cruelty. In the words of one of Darwin’s most thoughtful successors, George C. Williams²,

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbor at getting genes into future generations, in which those successful genes provide the message that instructs the development of the next generation, in which that message is always ‘exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximize our genes’ success’, in which the closest thing to a golden rule is ‘don’t cheat, unless it is likely to provide a net benefit’?

Bernard Shaw was driven to embrace a confused idea of Lamarckian evolution purely because of Darwinism’s moral implications. He wrote, in the Preface to Back to Methuselah:

When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.

His Devil’s Disciple was an altogether jollier rogue than Darwin’s Chaplain. Shaw didn’t think of himself as religious, but he had that childlike inability to distinguish what is true from what we’d like to be true. The same kind of thing drives today’s populist opposition to evolution³:

The most evolution could produce would be the idea that ‘might makes right.’ When Hitler exterminated approximately 10 million innocent men, women, and children, he acted in complete agreement with the theory of evolution and in complete disagreement with everything humans know to be right and wrong . . . If you teach children that they evolved from monkeys, then they will act like monkeys.

An opposite response to the callousness of natural selection is to exult in it, along with the Social Darwinists and – astonishingly – H. G. Wells. The New Republic, where Wells outlines his Darwinian Utopia, contains some blood-chilling lines:⁴

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity – beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.

Wells’s colleague Julian Huxley downplayed, in effect, the pessimism of the Devil’s Chaplain as he tried to build an ethical system on what he saw as evolution’s progressive aspects. His ‘Progress, Biological and Other’, the first of his Essays of a Biologist,⁵ contains passages that read almost like a call to arms under evolution’s banner:

[man’s] face is set in the same direction as the main tide of evolving life, and his highest destiny, the end towards which he has so long perceived that he must strive, is to extend to new possibilities the process with which, for all these millions of years, nature has already been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful methods, to accelerate by means of his consciousness what in the past has been the work of blind unconscious forces.

I prefer to stand up with Julian’s refreshingly belligerent grandfather T. H. Huxley, agree that natural selection is the dominant force in biological evolution unlike Shaw, admit its unpleasantness unlike Julian, and, unlike Wells, fight against it as a human being. Here is T. H., in his Romanes Lecture in Oxford in 1893, on ‘Evolution and Ethics’:⁶

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

That is G. C. Williams’s recommendation today, and it is mine. I hear the bleak sermon of the Devil’s Chaplain as a call to arms. As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. My previous books, such as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker,⁷ extol the inescapable factual correctness of the Devil’s Chaplain (had Darwin decided to extend the list of melancholy adjectives in the Chaplain’s indictment, he would very probably have chosen both ‘selfish’ and ‘blind’). At the same time I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’

If you seem to smell inconsistency or even contradiction, you are mistaken. There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being; any more than there is inconsistency in explaining cancer as an academic doctor while fighting it as a practising one. For good Darwinian reasons, evolution gave us a brain whose size increased to the point where it became capable of understanding its own provenance, of deploring the moral implications and of fighting against them. Every time we use contraception we demonstrate that brains can thwart Darwinian designs. If, as my wife suggests to me, selfish genes are Frankensteins and all life their monster, it is only we that can complete the fable by turning against our creators. We face an almost exact negation of Bishop Heber’s lines, ‘Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile.’ Yes, man can be vile too, but we are the only potential island of refuge from the implications of the Devil’s Chaplain: from the cruelty, and the clumsy, blundering waste.

For our species, with its unique gift of foresight – product of the simulated virtual-reality we call the human imagination – can plan the very opposite of waste with, if we get it right, a minimum of clumsy blunders. And there is true solace in the blessed gift of understanding, even if what we understand is the unwelcome message of the Devil’s Chaplain. It is as though the Chaplain matured and offered a second half to the sermon. Yes, says the matured Chaplain, the historic process that caused you to exist is wasteful, cruel and low. But exult in your existence, because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only one species, and only a minority of the members of that species; but there lies hope.

Exult even more that the clumsy and cruel algorithm of natural selection has generated a machine capable of internalizing the algorithm, setting up a model of itself – and much more – in microcosm inside the human skull. I may have disparaged Julian Huxley in these pages, but he published a poem in 1926 which says something of what I want to say⁸ (and a few things that I don’t want to say):

The world of things entered your infant mind

To populate that crystal cabinet.

Within its walls the strangest partners met,

And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.

For, once within, corporeal fact could find

A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt

Built there your little microcosm – which yet

Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.

Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:

Equator speaks with pole, and night with day:

Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars –

A million isolations burn away.

The Universe can live and work and plan,

At last made God within the mind of man.

Julian Huxley later wrote, in his Essays of a Humanist:⁹

This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet.

Huxley’s fellow luminary of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, the great Russian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said something similar:¹⁰

In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself.

So, the Devil’s Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight – something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection – and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos.

We are blessed with brains which, if educated and allowed free rein, are capable of modelling the universe, with its physical laws in which the Darwinian algorithm is embedded. As Darwin himself put it, in the famous closing lines of the Origin of Species:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed* into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up full-face into the keen wind of understanding: Yeats’s ‘Winds that blow through the starry ways’. In another essay, I quote the words of an inspiring teacher, F. W. Sanderson, who urged his pupils to ‘live dangerously . . .’

. . . full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create – such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.

Safety and happiness would mean being satisfied with easy answers and cheap comforts, living a warm comfortable lie. The daemonic alternative urged by my matured Devil’s Chaplain is risky. You stand to lose comforting delusions: you can no longer suck at the pacifier of faith in immortality. To set against that risk, you stand to gain ‘growth and happiness’; the joy of knowing that you have grown up, faced up to what existence means; to the fact that it is temporary and all the more precious for it.†

1.2

What is True?

¹¹

A little learning is a dangerous thing. This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark,* but it comes into its own in the special case where the little learning is in philosophy (as it often is). A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word (‘true’) is likely to encounter a form of philosophical heckling which goes something like this:

There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favour your brand of truth.

That strand of half-baked philosophy goes by the name of cultural relativism. It is one aspect of the Fashionable Nonsense detected by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,¹² or the Higher Superstition of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.¹³ The feminist version is ably exposed by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, authors of Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies:¹⁴

Women’s Studies students are now being taught that logic is a tool of domination . . . the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are incompatible with ‘women’s ways of knowing’ . . . These ‘subjectivist’ women see the methods of logic, analysis and abstraction as ‘alien territory belonging to men’ and ‘value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth’.

How should scientists respond to the allegation that our ‘faith’ in logic and scientific truth is just that – faith – not ‘privileged’ (favourite in-word) over alternative truths? A minimal response is that science gets results. As I put it in River Out of Eden,¹⁵

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite . . . If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

But is it still just our Western scientific bias to be impressed by accurate prediction; impressed by the power to slingshot rockets around Jupiter to reach Saturn, or intercept and repair the Hubble telescope; impressed by logic itself? Well, let’s concede the point and think sociologically, even democratically. Suppose we agree, temporarily, to treat scientific truth as just one truth among many, and lay it alongside all the rival contenders: Trobriand truth, Kikuyu truth, Maori truth, Inuit truth, Navajo truth, Yanomamo truth, !Kung San truth, feminist truth, Islamic truth, Hindu truth. The list is endless – and thereby hangs a revealing observation.

In theory, people could switch allegiance from any one ‘truth’ to any other if they decide it has greater merit. On what basis might they do so? Why would one change from, say, Kikuyu truth to Navajo truth? Such merit-driven switches are rare. With one crucially important exception. Scientific truth is the only member of the list which regularly persuades converts of its superiority. People are loyal to other belief systems for one reason only: they were brought up that way, and they have never known anything better. When people are lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to vote with their feet, doctors and their kind prosper while witch doctors decline. Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others. Admittedly, religious missionaries have successfully claimed converts in great numbers all over the underdeveloped world. But they succeed not because of the merits of their religion but because of the science-based technology for which it is pardonably, but wrongly, given credit.

Surely the Christian God must be superior to our Juju, because Christ’s representatives come bearing rifles, telescopes, chainsaws, radios, almanacs that predict eclipses to the minute, and medicines that work.

So much for cultural relativism. A different type of truth-heckler prefers to drop the name of Karl Popper or (more fashionably) Thomas Kuhn:

There is no absolute truth. Your scientific truths are merely hypotheses that have so far failed to be falsified, destined to be superseded. At worst, after the next scientific revolution, today’s ‘truths’ will seem quaint and absurd, if not actually false. The best you scientists can hope for is a series of approximations which progressively reduce errors but never eliminate them.

The Popperian heckle partly stems from the accidental fact that philosophers of science are traditionally obsessed with one piece of scientific history: the comparison between Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravitation. It is true that Newton’s inverse square law has turned out to be an approximation, a special case of Einstein’s more general formula. If this is the only piece of scientific history you know, you might indeed conclude that all apparent truths are mere approximations, fated to be superseded. There is even a quite interesting sense in which all our sensory perceptions – the ‘real’ things that we ‘see with our own eyes’ – may be regarded as unfalsified ‘hypotheses’ about the world, vulnerable to change. This provides a good way to think about illusions such as the Necker Cube.

The flat pattern of ink on paper is compatible with two alternative ‘hypotheses’ of solidity. So we see a solid cube which, after a few seconds, ‘flips’ to a different cube, then flips back to the first cube, and so on. Perhaps sense data only ever confirm or reject mental ‘hypotheses’ about what is out there.¹⁶

Well, that is an interesting theory; so is the philosopher’s notion that science proceeds by conjecture and refutation; and so is the analogy between the two. This line of thought – all our percepts are hypothetical models in the brain – might lead us to fear some future blurring of the distinction between reality and illusion in our descendants, whose lives will be even more dominated by computers capable of generating vivid models of their own. Without venturing into the high-tech worlds of virtual reality, we already know that our senses are easily deceived. Conjurors – professional illusionists –